I spent three hours standing in the freezing rain outside a closed trattoria in Trastevere back in 2018 because a “top-rated” travel app told me it was open, and that was the day I deleted about 40% of the junk on my phone. Most travel apps are built by people who want to sell you …
It was 11:42 PM on a Tuesday in October 2022 when I realized my entire intellectual life was a lie. I was staring at a conflict error in Obsidian. 400 of my ‘permanent’ notes had somehow glitched during a sync, leaving me with nothing but strings of garbled code and broken backlinks. I sat there …
I’m going to start with a confession that still makes my stomach do a weird little flip when I think about it. It was 2019, and I was sitting at Le Diplomate in DC—this incredibly loud, overpriced French brasserie where everyone pretends they’re in Paris instead of three blocks from a CVS. I was there …
I recently spent twenty minutes staring at a draft of a LinkedIn message, my thumb hovering over the ‘send’ button, feeling like an absolute fraud. I was trying to reach out to a Senior Director at a logistics firm—let’s call it Maersk, because it was Maersk—and every sentence I wrote felt like I was trying …
The 40-hour workweek is a scam. It was invented a century ago for factory workers who stood at assembly lines, and yet here we are, sitting in ergonomic chairs staring at pixels, pretending that the same math applies to us. It doesn’t. I realized this back in 2018 when I was working at a mid-sized …
Three years ago, I spent an entire Saturday—roughly eleven hours—building the ‘perfect’ dashboard in Notion. I had linked databases for my reading list, a weather widget I never looked at, and a gallery view for my ‘goals’ that featured high-resolution photos of mountains I will never climb. By 10 PM, I felt like a god …
I spent three hours last Tuesday archiving 142 emails just so I could see that little picture of a hot air balloon on my Gmail screen. It felt great for exactly nine seconds. Then I realized I hadn’t actually written the project proposal that was due at 5 PM. I work in logistics—I deal with …
I remember sitting in my kitchen at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday in June 2022, staring at a screen filled with purple and blue emojis. I was building a “perfect” Notion dashboard for a local community garden fundraiser I was helping out with. I spent probably forty hours that week setting up relational databases, rollups, …
“Follow your passion” is the most expensive lie I ever bought into. It’s the kind of advice people give when they’ve already made it, or when they’re trying to sell you a $497 online course on how to become a nomadic life coach. It sounds poetic. It looks great on a Pinterest board with a …
I got a LinkedIn message yesterday from a guy named “Steve” that was so obviously written by ChatGPT it made my teeth ache. It had that specific, oily sheen of fake politeness. You know the one. It used the word “delve.” It told me he hoped this message found me well. It was perfectly punctuated, …